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Virgilio Martinez: the chef putting Peruvian food on the map

Apr 01, 2017

As he prepares to visit Australia for the World’s 50 Best Restaurant awards, Peruvian chef Virgilio Martínez tells delicious. the extreme lengths he goes to in creating dishes for his restaurant, Central.

At his restaurant, Central, in Lima, Virgilio Martínez serves a dish millions of years in the making. It’s a single scallop, cured for three hours in tumbo (a type of passionfruit), sparsely covered in fragments of seaweed crisps and twigs of algae that have been brushed with a sugar he makes from Peruvian fruits, then fried. The dish is cold, one bite, and served on a scallop shell fossilised in rock. Inspired by finding fossilised scallops in the Ocucaje Desert – now bone dry, but once an ocean – as well as a native Peruvian method of making an early form of ceviche using tumbo, Martínez merges time, place and people together into one moment.

It was an unusual path to the top for the Peruvian chef, who traded skateboarding (he was a semi-pro before injuries curtailed any career aspirations) for working in some of the world’s best restaurants. Now he runs one himself (number four in the world, to be exact, in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards), with two more in London and another planned near Cuzco, in south-eastern Peru. At 39, he’s part of the global culinary elite, and as such will be making his way to Australia in April as the 2017 awards – let’s call them The Oscars of the food world – come to Melbourne.

Driving Martínez is a fascination with altitude and biodiversity; his dishes at Central are collections of ingredients that make sense with one another, occupying the same vertical space in a country defined by its mountain ranges, the Amazon and the coast. “We are living in one of the most diverse places in the world,” says the chef. “You have the Andes, the jungle, the mountains. Everything is changing from one side to the other. Even our coast has so many different microclimates, so the food we prepare is a whole understanding of different regions and the different microclimates of these ecosystems.”

His menu, which might reach 18 courses, brings together a collection of old and new ingredients that grow together at the same altitude. Helping to make sense of them is Mater Iniciativa, a project he set up with his sister, which is dedicated to finding, categorising and understanding Peru’s indigenous produce. Currently they’re working on deriving natural dyes and thickening agents from different plants and tubers. “It’s very hard work; you have to travel a lot in different parts of Peru and try to understand, for example, potatoes: what they are like, who is using them and where are they growing,” explains Martínez, who faces the challenge of trying to distil Peru’s extreme biological range, which includes several thousand varieties of potato, say, into dishes fit to grace his menu.

“There are thousands of tubers, different corns, different quinoa, ancient grains, then all the fish that are in the jungle. Then it’s about meeting different cultures in the Amazon, speaking different languages. For me, it’s a whole new understanding; it’s a whole new learning and a new way to understand our food.” This evolves into dishes like ‘Diversity of Corn’, which uses six types of corn to make colourful cakes, a broth and fried corn silk; or ‘Extreme Stems’, combining a variety of tubers and plants growing at 3600 metres above sea level.

Last year the chef made a whistle-stop journey to Australia to launch his book, Central, stopping at Sydney’s Cirrus where chef Brent Savage designed a menu inspired by his cooking. But with the World’s 50 Best landing in Melbourne on April 5, Martinez will this time be exposed to Australian food culture in depth, with Attica’s Ben Shewry offering to show him around. “[The awards are] huge for Australia,” says Martínez. “We all know a lot of your chefs, but not 20 or 30 or 40, and not what Australian cuisine is. I’m very curious about what’s happening with the ingredients and in the markets.”

The Peruvian knows the effect placing in the top 50 can have, with Central making its debut in 2013 and climbing since. “Of course it has a lot of influence on the whole scene,” he explains. “After that list the reservations were crazy, and people start to know about who you are and your philosophy.” It’s not only Central that benefits. As other restaurants in South America – including Maido and Astrid y Gaston in Peru – have placed, Latin American food has received huge international exposure.

“Whatever happens, it’s very good for all South America. We’re not competing really, because the same people that come to Central come to those and more restaurants. The more we work together, the more people are going to come to Lima.”

And on whether he wants to take out number one? “Probably the mean part of me!” he laughs. “But honestly, I don’t think that’s going to happen, and I’m not sure we’re ready for that. Just to be in that huge competition, I’m really happy.”

Look out for our Peruvian food and travel story in the June issue of delicious.

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